Anthropic Donates Agent Skills to the Linux Foundation's Agentic AI Foundation, One of Four New Projects Alongside OpenAI's Open Responses
Anthropic said on Oct. 22 it is donating Agent Skills, its open standard for packaging agent instructions and scripts, to the Agentic AI Foundation under the Linux Foundation. Anthropic says more than 70 agent platforms, including ChatGPT, Cursor, GitHub Copilot and VS Code, have integrated it. The foundation also took in Open Responses from OpenAI, OpenEnv from Hugging Face and OpenSandbox from Alibaba, bringing it to 10 projects.
After the Model Context Protocol, Anthropic has handed a second agent standard it created to neutral governance, and rivals are doing the same with their own projects. On Thursday, October 22, Anthropic said it is donating Agent Skills to the Agentic AI Foundation (AAIF), which operates under the Linux Foundation. The donation covers the Agent Skills name and logo, its GitHub organization and the agentskills.io domain. Developers can keep using or contributing to the standard without joining the AAIF, Anthropic says.
What Agent Skills is
A skill, in Anthropic's description, is a folder containing a SKILL.md file that teaches an agent a specific task or domain, along with any scripts or reference material it needs. Anthropic says it developed skills while working on Claude Code and published Agent Skills as an open standard in December 2025. Since then, it says, more than 70 agent platforms have integrated it, including ChatGPT, Cursor, GitHub Copilot and VS Code. Anthropic also says 1 million skills have been published and nearly 280 million installed.
Engineers from Anthropic, Google, OpenAI and other companies will maintain the standard as individuals, with David Soria Parra and Mahesh Murag as lead maintainers, according to Anthropic. Anthropic says it has proposed starting with a roadmap of versioned releases, a formal proposal process, and security guidance for people who write and install skills.
Four projects in one day
The AAIF announced Agent Skills as one of four new projects at AGNTCon + MCPCon North America in San Jose. The others are Open Responses from OpenAI, a specification for multi-provider model interfaces based on OpenAI's Responses API, and OpenEnv from Hugging Face, a framework for building and sharing reinforcement-learning environments. The fourth is OpenSandbox from Alibaba, a sandbox platform for running coding agents and other AI workloads. The foundation says the additions take it to 10 hosted projects in its first year, up from three at launch in December 2025. Its existing projects include the Model Context Protocol, AGENTS.md, goose and the Agent2Agent protocol.
Anthropic co-founded the AAIF with Block and OpenAI and had already donated MCP to it. With Agent Skills joining, two standards Anthropic created now sit with the foundation. How neutral governance changes the standard will depend on the roadmap process, which for now is Anthropic's proposal.
Limits
- The adoption figures, including 70-plus platforms and 1 million skills published, are Anthropic's own, and we have not verified them. Anthropic does not say how it counts installs.
- Anthropic's post says skills launched in October 2025 and the standard was published in December 2025. The foundation's release quotes Soria Parra as saying Anthropic launched Agent Skills "a year ago." We use Anthropic's dates.
- We relied on Anthropic's post and the Linux Foundation's release. We found no independent reporting on the donation.